


Inter Alia

by FourteenMinutes



Category: Prey (Video Game 2017)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Dubious Morality, Gen, TyphonMod!Morgan, implied erotophonophilia, mildly but lets keep it honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 15:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12135630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FourteenMinutes/pseuds/FourteenMinutes
Summary: Inter Alia [adv.]Among other thingsWhat separates a man from the monsters he fights? Do you want to know the reason?[Just an excuse for a short TyphonMod!Morgan fic]





	Inter Alia

Breath echoes in his head - timeless, listless, humdrum noise. Ragged, bone broken, bare, he hears it scrape against the inside of his skin like some familiar symphony. His breath - in, out, in. Then theirs. Out, so very out, and yet it bleeds into his thoughts as if it belongs there. Out, in. In, out.

Ignore the crackle of static, a bluster of pulse. A low, electrically charged moan passes through his body in a shiver and his heart hums. Beneath the cold and distant starlight, there is no discernible difference between them.

Through the leaves the Phantom shivers, whole body crackling upwards, outwards, at angles known only to hardened geometrists. One foot here, one foot elsewhere. Morgan can feel it now, clearly, the shadow that dances across the floor of the Arboretum spilling inside his head like blotting ink. Never obscuring - revealing.

Him and it, it and him, the Typhon growing through his body with every click of a neuromod. But they are already the same, no amount of meddling can change that.

Against the night the creature mutters, words the last thoughts of someone long since dead. Sound dies on the trees, but echoes off of the glass roof like the chambers of a heart. Then breathing, always breathing - his, theirs - theirs, his - punctuating the cold silence of the dying space station. Talos-I has to die, it is already almost dead. The Phantom has to die, and so does Morgan Yu.

Out.

His breath hitches, his body tenses. A hiss as the Phantom reappraises its surroundings. If it finds him, it will try to kill him - its brutality raw, mindless, effortless. But he will kill it first. That is the way of things, their dance, their struggle. It will try to kill him, but it will not succeed.

In.

Light creeps around his fingers, pulses like a second heartbeat. It’s lightning, fire, a burning sense of being that pulls at him from the inside out. He is unspooling, unravelling, from black to head to white to fingertips - brain and body and burning and being.

Not that it matters. There’s yesterday, but no last week, no last year, no memories not pulled out of scrapbooks and abandoned terminals. There’s no time before he felt the slow, persistent pull of thought on thought, of seeping otherness staining him through. The neuromods might speed things up, make the light burn a little harder, but he can’t remember what it was like not to feel like one of them.

Spilt coffee, the mimic tearing into Doctor Bellamy’s face, his mouth still open in a perfect ‘o’ of surprise. A leap in his pulse, a flash of excitement beneath confusion. Maybe that was what it felt like to feel alive.

Then the first mimic, second, third. He clutches at the comforting weight of the wrench and presses it tight to his chest. It swings like a pendulum, and with each Typhon dead the dance stops a little longer. Until it begins again.

Dead Typhon look the same, hunched shadows and glittering skin slumped across the tiles before gradually dissipating into dust. Dead people don’t. Igwe’s face purpled, strained. Mikhaila’s final, wearied sigh. Salazar’s single look of shock fading to anger as he turned the gun on them. Then blood on the cargo bay doors.

They had been cowering like animals, powerless, motionless, waiting for something to finish them off. He knew it, he’d felt it, the taunt shimmer of the air between them like the sheen of sweat on a cow’s flank. Maybe it wasn’t mercy, but he’d done it.

Out.

He steps from the foliage, stows the wrench, raises his gun. Two shots - the mimic in the far hedge. First shot staggers, wounds without blood. Second disperses it to stardust.

In.

It presses its way to his lips cruelly, wantonly, curving them upwards into a satisfied smirk. But he has to smile. Because he isn’t like them. Oh he is, but then he isn’t at all. He’s better.

He aims for the Phantom’s head. Empty click of an empty chamber. Tossing it to one side, he draws the wrench. It growls, lunges, but he still strikes the first blow. Shadows shatter, his suit protests, a single line of blood begins to form down the side of his face.

It lunges again, savage, unthinking, and he pushes underneath, feeling his blood hum as the blow strikes at its belly. He twists out from beneath it, another blow to its side.

Shrieking, the Phantom crackles away from him in fury, beginning to tear itself in two as ether trails behind it. But he’s there too, a sharp crack and he lands a blow on its head, pain driving the two parts to one again. Where it is quick, he can be quicker, light and lightning carving its way from one body to another as the air thrums like fire.

They are both savage, uncontrollable, indomitable. Only Morgan knows it.

With every blow he lands he feels the hitch to his breath, the hum to his chest, the sudden rush of pleasure as surely as the reverb along his arm. He is not like them because he knows that he is dancing, that death will come for him anyway. While he is alive though, he gets to choose, and he chooses to give in to the monster. Unless he was one already.


End file.
